Indian Firms Snag Most H1-B Visas

Indian Firms Snag Most H1-B Visas

Monday, 10 March 2008, 00:00 CDT

By Chidanand Rajghatta

WASHINGTON: The periodic flap over the H1-B visas issue is set to blow up again in an election season, after latest figures show Indian companies accounted for nearly 80% of the visa petitions approved in 2007 for the top ten participants in the programme.

Infosys and Wipro top the list of visa beneficiaries in 2007, with 4,559 and 2,567 approved visa petitions, respectively, according to data from the US Citizenship & Immigration Services.

Overall, six of the top 10 visa recipients in 2007 are based in India; two others among the top 10, Cognizant Technology Solutions and UST Global, are headquartered in the US but have most of their operations in India.

Microsoft and Intel, which also have significant India operations, are the only two traditional US tech companies among the top 10. Microsoft received 959 visa petition approvals, while Intel got 369. The numbers have once again stoked fears among protectionists in the US that Indian companies are working the system to bring in guest workers to displace Americans and eventually take away the jobs.

The H1-B programme was originally meant to help American companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel attract skilled hi- tech workers from abroad to meet domestic skills shortage. But critics say what is happening now is that Indian companies are sending their workers to US companies and rotating them back home after a year or two, taking both skills and jobs back with them.

The Indian industry counters that this is just the outcome of globalization in a 24/7 flat world where distances are shrinking and boundaries are being broken. If the US does not allow skilled foreign workers into the country, then American business will suffer and American jobs will migrate abroad in any case because of local skills shortage and cost factors.

The issue has been relatively below the radar in the presidential elections in 2008 (compared to 2004), but locked in a close race for the Democratic nomination, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have promised action to prevent American jobs from going abroad. Obama, in particular, has been talking about stopping tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. At the same time, he has said globalization is inevitable and "we can't draw a moat around us".

Hillary Clinton too has broadly struck the same notes, promising to rid the tax code of loopholes and giveaways that enable US companies to ship jobs abroad.

But hamstrung by shortage of skill sets in the US, where fewer Americans are taking to math, science, and engineering each year, feisty American companies are pressing for an increase in H1-B quota from its current 65,000 annual cap to 115,000, failing which they are all too willing to migrate jobs abroad with their Indian partners. Microsoft's Bill Gates, who's been the industry spokesman on the matter, is scheduled to testify before Congress next week on how to keep America competitive.

His solution, professed several times on the Hill increase H1-B and green card quotas, especially for those who have been educated and trained in the United States. But Gates' argument representing the industry viewpoint is lost on law-makers with a narrower focus. Charles Grassley and Richard Durbin, two Senators who have long been critics of the H1-B programme, are said to be considering measures to prevent foreign companies from manipulating the skilled guest worker programme, including penalizing and banning firms if they file multiple petitions for the same individuals.

The US will begin accepting H-1B visas on April 1 for the next fiscal year, which begins October 1. Last year, the US received 123,480 visa petitions in two days, more than double the 65,000 cap. Companies receiving visas were randomly picked by USCIS via a computerized lottery.

Source: The Times of India

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